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Instead of allowing a rule to run and then failing with a message that the rule was inactive, it would be nice to prevent the rule from running all together with some pop-up message notifying the Admin the rule is currently inactive. I have had this happen several times while troubleshooting other failures and on rules that have been made inactive after failing several runs in a row.

Two ideas that would make this a better admin experience:

  1. When you try to manually run the rule, have a pop-up that says “This rule is inactive; please activate the rule before running it.” that prevents you altogether from running the rule, OR
  2. When you try to manually run the rule, have a soft error that says “This rule is currently inactive; do you wish to proceed?” with options for Yes or Cancel. 

I am unsure if there is any true use case for running an inactive rule and having it succeed, but I know this would prevent headaches for me & other admins in the future! Small change, big impact 😊

Adding a note here since I can’t revise the original post - @TMaier made a good point in Slack that it’s nice to be able to run inactive rules for test runs. With this in mind, maybe the solution is to only allow inactive rules to run as test runs, and surface this via a soft error message that says: This Rule is currently inactive and will only run as a test - do you wish to proceed? Yes/No

I do indeed appreciate the ability to do test runs on inactive rules. For especially risky drafts, I deactivate the rule before conducting testing to eliminate the possibility of a misclick unchecking the test run checkbox resulting in an accidental production run of unfinished logic. I’d like to see that stick around. 

 

That being said, I can get behind the idea of a quick pop-up warning to alert the user that a rule is not active - there’s no harm in giving people a heads up that if they’re intending to do anything more than a test run, inactive rules will fail. At the very least, a straightforward error message in the logs would be nice - I think the current behavior generates a vague generic error when you try a non test execution on a deactivated rule.

Thank you for submitting this! 100% agree, It gets me every time.

A warning will be very helpful because I either:
a) I intended to test the rule, and I didn't realize I was about to execute it for real
b) I intended to execute it for real but it will not because is inactive

This will save time and improve the experience. Small change, big impact as Jen said.
 

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